Developing Proxies to .NET Libraries

Proxying in WebSharper is the process of providing JavaScript-compilable F# implementations for classes and modules that were compiled without WebSharper, for example the Base Class Library classes such as Dictionary. The proxying graph relates proxied types to proxy types. The proxy graph is constructed by consulting all Proxying.AbstractProxyAttribute in an assembly and its references.

The simple implementation, ProxyAttribute, is applied to the proxied type and should reference the proxy type. Sample usage:

open System.Collections.Generic

[<Proxy(typeof<Dictionary<_, _>)>]
[<JavaScript>]
type MyDictionary<'K, 'V> () =

    let mutable count = 0

    member this.Count = count

WebSharper projects that reference the DLL containing the above code can use the standard type Dictionary<_, _> in client-side code, and the above implementation will be called instead.

Sometimes it is not possible to use typeof, for example when proxying a module. In this case, you can use the type or module's full name instead:

[<Proxy "Microsoft.FSharp.Collections.ArrayModule, \
      FSharp.Core, \
      Version=2.0.0.0, \
      Culture=neutral, \
      PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a">]
module MyArrayModule =

    [<Inline "$0.length">]
    let length<'T> (arr : 'T []) = 0

There are several things to remember when developing .NET proxy code:

• The string parameter to the ProxyAttribute must exactly match the FullName property of the generic definition of the target .NET type.

• The name, type, number of arguments and the calling convention of a proxy member must match exactly those of the member being proxied.

• It is legal for a proxy to be partial. If the proxied type doesn't implement all members, then client-side calls to proxied members will succeed and client-side calls to non-proxied members will fail. For example, WebSharper contains a proxy for the module Async, but does not implement certain methods such as RunSynchronously.